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Summary and more in depth answers from this Thursday’s Twitter
Q&A. Every Thursday from 3:30-4:30 I’m around on Twitter
answering any questions about anything. Even stuff I have no clue
on. Try me.

HOW DO I GET OVER INTERVIEW ANXIETY

Michael Kane (@unionkane)
asks: What are your tips for interviewing? I always seem to choke
up and get performance anxiety. Thanks!

ANSWER: Before an interview:

- Know everything you can about the history of
the business you are interviewing for. How did it start. The
backgrounds of the founders. What were the goals of the business.
How they’ve changed. When the business has faltered in the past.
With any large company you can always find this out.

- In a science fiction sense you want to mind-meld with
the company. It’s as if you WERE the company so the
ideas you start to come up with are ideas that will better the
company. This will shine through in the interview.

- If it’s a smaller company it’s not so easy to do this.
But then you can always know the competitors. Know the
ups and downs in the industry. Performance anxiety in an
interview is similar to anxiety in any performance – it’s 100%
related to low confidence. You build confidence through knowledge
and practice. I have a later post on this but I had HUGE anxiety
about going on TV the first time. I describe in a later post how
I overcame the anxiety.

- But before the interview, visualize the entire
interview in your head. Bring up all the points you
studied about the industry. About what your role will be. About
ideas you have.

- Make sure you exercise before the interview.
This also reduces anxiety. But it makes you tired. So once you
exercise, build the mind muscles back up by coming up with 10
ideas for the business. Even if its interviewing to work as a
shoe store salesman, make sure you understand every brand out
there, how the store can use social media to drive customers,
etc.

- You can usually get the names of the people you are
going to meet in the interview process. Of course, use
Google to find out everything about them. Again, the overriding
consideration is that knowledge builds confidence which reduces
anxiety. Exercise also reduces anxiety.

- Finally, surrender. Very important to have a
feeling of “Ok, I’ve done all I can. It’s in your hands now.
Whatever is the right thing will happen.” A feeling of surrender
and humility and a sense that there’s a higher power (even if you
call it something as silly as “The Force”) will help reduce
anxiety.

- Now go get the job. Don’t think about the past
(fired from prior jobs) or the future (if I don’t get this job
then I’m lost). These are “not useful” thoughts (see ”The Power of Negative Thinking”).

ANSWER: The only answer is really “wake up earlier”. We waste so
much time during the day. For instance, checking email is a 2-3
minute adventure. Many people check email on their phones or
computers at least once an hour. 16 hours in a day that’s 32
minutes a day. About 10,000 minutes a year. Over a 40 year period
that’s 400,000 minutes or X days checking emails.

Other time wasters that can store up minutes in your day:
watching dumb primetime TV. Going out drinking with friends (have
coffee with your friends mid-day). And there’s a million other
time wasters that can be read about in any number of productivity
books. What do you do with all this extra time? Easy. Go to sleep
an hour earlier. Wake up an hour earlier, refreshed (no prime
time junk in your brain).

This seems like not a big issue in your 20s and 30s. But
when you get older you realize that a minute of anger, a minute
of stress, a minute of junk is 60 seconds that you could’ve been
happy.

If you don’t exercise, if you don’t get the creative muscles
going and stay healthy, then when you are older all of that junk
adds up: you’ll be less happy, less healthy, quality of life will
be down.

ANSWER: It’s important to have someone you can trust that in just
about any situation you can turn to for advice. It’s no wonder
that many great businesses are started by two people: Google,
Microsoft, Apple. For me, I turn to Claudia (at Claudiayoga.com) when
I most need advice.

Read “The Essays of Warren Buffett” by Lawrence Cunningham to see
what the master has said over the past 50 years. Note, I’m not
even pushing my own book, “Trade Like Warren Buffett.” Cunningham’s
book, compiled from Buffett’s letters to investors, is better.

Second, read “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley. Ridley is
one of the smartest men alive right now. His book will
teach you how to question the assumptions constantly posed and
feared by the media and used to scare you. He goes over
everything from peak oil, to overpopulation, to wars and
violence, and analyzes all the statistics. Why is this useful?
How will this help you pick stocks?

It’s because picking stocks is not the hard part in investing.
Warren Buffett says it succinctly, “if you have good reason to
believe a company will still be here 20 years from now, it will
probably be a good investment.” We know Apple will still be here,
for instance, so that’s a good stock to pick.

The problem is: what do you do the next time there’s a 2008 (or
even a summer 2011) and all stocks crash. You have to be able to
really analyze and say “is the world ending” or “is this just a
blip.”

Look at this chart here of the Dow for instance. Can you see
where the crash of 1987 occurred? It’s barely noticeable. And in
your consciousness even it has to be barely noticeable. That’s
the hard part in investing. “The rational optimist” plus being
healthy and secure in other parts of your life, will help you
become a better investor.

The times when I lost the most money investing was not because I
was picking bad stocks. Most of the stocks eventually hit new
highs long after I sold them. It was because I was either unhappy
with my work life or marriage or family or whatever. And so not
thinking straight caused me to not invest straight. That’s the
key to successful investing.

CAN ONE BE AN ENTREPRENEUR IN THE MIDWEST?

Kern Patton (@kernicus) asks: Is being an tech entrepreneur in
the midwest impossible? Do I have to move to the coast?

The room was filled with potential entrepreneurs, each with
amazing ideas for tech, energy, marketing, and other sectors.

I absolutely think being on the coasts is the worst way right now
to be an entrepreneur. There’s a million little startups begging
for money from VCs and angels. The problem is there’s also a
billion little parties, meetups, tech meet-ups, etc. where
everyone parties, listens to boring talks, etc. All of this is a
distraction.

The Midwest is ½ as cheap as the coasts. Here’s what you do:

- Stay in the Midwest so you can live as cheaply as
possible
- Build your product or service
- Get a customer or traction. Begin to learn what can go
wrong in your business.
- Get revenues

Morgan_03 then followed up and said, “Really? Not even
“loving father, caring husband, successful
entrepreneur”?

ANSWER: All of these things are good things. I want to, of
course, be a caring father, for instance and I want to achieve
success in a variety of silos in my life. But when I’m on my
deathbed I ultimately want to be just me. Nothing to define me.
Nothing I can look back on and say “that was me” because all of
that is artificial and man-made. Any definition at all is
limiting. At the end of my life, when I’m staring into god knows
what, I want to be limitless.

HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO HAVE A PLAN?

Main Event (@djmainevent) asks: How important is having a plan
if you want to get anywhere in life?

ANSWER: It’s very important to have a plan. For instance, let’s
say you want to be able to bench press 200 lbs. (I’m making this
up, obviously. I never want to be able to bench press that). You
won’t get there randomly. You first come up with the goal (“bench
press 200 lbs”) and then with that goal in hand you know every
day how you can slightly improve to meet that goal. How you can
change your diet (more protein!), how you can get to a gym, what
increments you need to take in order to bench 200 lbs, which
muscles need to improve (there’s a billion little muscles around
the shoulder that have to be worked on with different machines,
etc). And so on.

I have about 8 goals that I’ve written down for 2012. I look at
them every day. The goals might change. I might not stick with
them. Or I might decide halfway through that I’m only going to
focus on 4 of them. But each day I come up with the plan for that
day that makes incremental improvement on all 8 goals. Those
incremental improvements compound in your life exponentially the
way money in a bank accumulating interest does. Before you know
it, you are rich in the sense that you’ve achieved your plan. But
without the plan, you are just flaying in the dark, with no money
in your mental bank.

HAVE YOU EVER GIVEN UP ON YOURSELF

bluenextbear (@bluenextbear) asks: Have you ever given up on
yourself?

ANSWER: It’s a perpetual problem I have and maybe many
people have: I give up on myself every day. I wake up, and I have
to make sure my first thoughts are not negative thoughts. I get
angry. And anger is just a small shade on the spectrum of
emotions away from fear. So I usually get scared next. Then I have to
go to the bathroom. Fast.

But when I’m done with that, the key is, how to get back on
track. I try to practice an ongoing meditation, labeling thoughts
as I catch them: “useful” or “not useful.” Any anger or fear
thoughts or thoughts of, “I can’t do this” go in the “not useful”
bucket. Then I begin my normal practices of the day. Exercising
the idea muscle, writing, exercising. And so on. [See the above
link on "The Power of Negative Thinking"]

Every day is a battle. Even if you have confidence one day there
are so many forces in the world (Media, news, pop culture,
family, enemies, bosses, colleagues, etc etc etc) that are trying
to bring you down that you need in your toolchest a daily method
of performing surgery on yourself so that if you do give up on
yourself, even if it’s just for a moment, you have a way of
coming back from the abyss.

In a black hole there’s something called the event horizon.
Once you enter that perimeter, there’s no escape and you are
sucked into the black hole. There’s no way possible for anything
to comeback once it’s in that zone. The same thing with
giving up on yourself. You have to pull yourself back before you
are sucked into that zone. Don’t entertain it, don’t dance with
it, don’t feed that feeling. You must say “not useful” and move
on. Continue with the incremental implementation of your plan,
discussed above.

DO MEN CHEAT?

Lynn Hasselbrgr (LynnHasselbrgr) asks: What are the statistics of
men cheating more than once?

ANSWER: I don’t know the exact statistics but my gut tells me if
a man cheats once, he’s going to cheat twice. I once read a story
about a guy who would fire anyone who cheated on his wife
“because if he can cheat on his wife, he can cheat me.” People
cheat for many reasons: they might not be happy in their marriage
is only one of them. In which case, they should end their
marriage.

However, a big reason men cheat is because they are addicts. They
love the chase, they’re insecure and need that chase, and then
acceptance of the invitation to sex, to feel alive again. This
might be a reaction not to the marriage but to any number of
things that have happened since childhood.

So how do you treat an addiction? Can a person actually change.
One possible solution is to go to a 12 step plan like Sex and
Love Addicts Anonymous. SLAA.

I know many people who have successfully been able to go to SLAA
and get over their love or sex addictions. But you have to treat
it like you would treat any other illness. You can’t just say “no
more cheating” because that will do nothing to solve the
underlying causes of what happened.

HOW TO BE A BETTER DECISION MAKER

@jaltucher here you go: how to
become a faster decision maker while still maintaining the
quality of your decision?

But the fact is, when I was down on the floor, going broke,
losing my home, losing family, losing friends, losing businesses,
any number of times over the past 25 years, the only things
that’s lifted me up is simultaneously getting physically,
emotionally, mentally, and spiritually healthy.

Imagine that you have four bodies and not just one. And there’s
an invisible blood that flows back and forth through each body,
the way blood flows through your physical body. If any of the
bodies or out of balance, then this invisible blood will not
flow. And you will start to feel it. You’ll get less healthy,
your relationships will sour, your ability to have ideas and
execute on them will turn to crap, your ability to surrender and
find balance in your life will falter.

But when everything is in balance and the invisible blood is
flowing, when the heart of your being is pumping without any
impediments, then you will make decisions faster, better,
smarter.

WHAT’S THE BEST WAYS TO MAKE A LIVING

Candri (@Candriawan) asks: In “Margin Call” there’s a
quote: There are 3 ways to make a living: be first, be smarter,
or cheat. What do u think?

ANSWER: None of those are the answer. There were
many search engines before Google, for instance and many social
networks before Facebook. So they were first but didn’t make a
living. They all failed. And being smarter doesn’t always work
either. Microsoft products were never considered best (Steve Jobs
gave some funny quotes to Walter Isaacson about this) but they
won.

And cheating might work, but also might make you end up worse
than you ever were. So all of the methods above could work but
they also might fail horribly.

The absolute best, surefire way to make a good living is
to help someone else make a good living. If your
business or service helps others make money, particularly if your
method is scalable, then the amount of money you can make is
incalculable.

For instance, when I really needed to make some money, I advised
someone on how they can sell their business. They made $41.5mm
dollars. I can guarantee you I made good money when thathappened.
I was spending a lot of time, for free, before that happened. But
once he made money, I made money.

HOW TO NETWORK AT A WEDDING?

Yoav Ezer (@YoavEzer) asks:
I am in a wedding with a lot of high level executives. Should I
network?

The best way to network with someone cold (i.e. you don’t know
them and know nobody in common) is to give them ideas that can
help them make money. If you know who will be at the wedding,
research their businesses, come up with 10 ideas for each person
how they can improve their business.

It’s not like you are going to go up to them and say, “here are
10 ideas for your business.” But now if you are sitting next to
them or find yourself casually talking to any of the people you
want to network with, you are ready to instantly go into
network-mode if the conversation starts to veer in the direction
of their business.

Practicing this ability will get you better and better at it
until you no longer have to come up with the lists in advance.
You’ll be an idea machine at any event, able to manage the
balance between casual conversation and idea generation with
ease, and everyone will say, “we should have a
meeting/coffee/lunch about this over the next week!”